Welcome to the wonderful world of Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated! No spoilers to be found here!

Why the "no spoilers" announcement? Of course, because Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated Is indeed a legacy game. For those of you who are not aware of Legacy-type games, let me explain briefly what makes this type of games so specific. Whereas a normal boardgame starts anew whenever you put it onto the table, a Legacy game requires the players to make permanent changes to the game whenever they play a new round. In Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated this means that the players will change the gameboard by applying stickers, they will permanently destroy playing cards and add new cards from a hidden stash, and the status and achievements of their characters will be recorded and carried on from game to game. Also, they will write on game material, including the board and cards, and that they will add stickers with new rules to the rule book. All this contributes to a major campaign, and in Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated this campaign will have a length of check approximately 10 rounds, perhaps a bit more.

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However, play will not be over once the campaign is finished. At that point the players will have created their own unique game which can be re-used for future sessions, and furthermore there are possibilities to mix components from Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated with those from standard Clank!, giving the players a wide range of uses once they have finished the campaign. Even more, it is possible to mix components from different Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated games, so that ever more playing combinations can be enjoyed by the players.

But what kind of game is Clank!? It's a deckbuilding game about a bunch of thieves entering a dragon's den, searching for valuable artifacts and trying to escape with them. At the beginning of the game each player possesses a more or less identical deck of 10 cards (this will change too during the campaign) which gives them icons for movement, combat and purchasing new cards. During their turns the players always play a hand of 5 cards, trying to use the symbols on the cards to their best possible effects.

In gaming terms, this means that they will use movement icons to go down ever deeper in the dungeon to find one of the desired artifacts, and that they will use combat icons to fight monsters, possibly gaining rewards from defeating a monster or fulfilling a quest. Permanently available is a row of new cards from which the players can purchase cards with their purchase icons, and add them to their own decks, with the card powers increasing with their prices.

As it is a deckbuilding game, this purchase of new cards means that the player decks will get ever bigger, impaling on their effectiveness and the probability and frequency to re-draw powerful cards. Thus, the players will have to chose carefully which new cards to add to their decks, and it's also very helpful to go for cards which allow the removing of other cards from their decks, because this allows the players to finetune their decks to get more powerful and effective. In contrast to the normal Clank there are less cards that allow to trash other cards, especially at the beginning of the campaign. But as said, more cards come into play and there are also other ways to improve your starting hand.

As the players are thieves, they try to do their business as sneaky as possible, but during the game it is unavoidable that they will occasionally make some noise - or better: Clank!. If such cards are played, the players must add cubes of their colour to a Clank! area on the sideboard, and frequently during the game all cubes from this sideboard will be thrown into a Dragon Attack bag. It then comes to a Dragon Attack, meaning that a number of cubes is drawn from this bag with every cube drawn meaning the loss of a Lifepoint for a player's character. Once a certain number of cubes of one player has been drawn, that player will be knocked out and the game is over for him, so that the players cannot linger in the dungeon and waste turn after turn. Instead, the way to be most effective in Clank! is to make haste and try to leave the dungeon as quickly - and silently - as possible.

Already the basic game of Clank! and its expansions have chained us to the gaming table for many hours. The addiction factor is so high that we even developed our own campaign rules, playing our way through all different gameboards and keeping some cards along the way. However, we were absolutely thrilled when we learned about the arrival of a Clank! Legacy game, and now we are finally able to enjoy a major campaign in a different world of Clank!.

Coming equipped with nice oversized miniatures, Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated takes the players into the universe of Acquisitions Incorporated, an online animated series telling about a ragtag band of adventurers who are out hunting for the big treasures. The players now can take the roles of different characters from that series, and each player will set up his own dungeon exploration franchise, expanding and improving his business during the course of the campaign.

As indicated above, the campaign brings along a wagonload of surprises which make additions to the gameboard and introduce new cards. The core element for the new game elements is a book of paragraphs which unfolds the story and with this introduces lots of innovations, instructing the players to adjust the game accordingly. The reading of a paragraph can be triggered by many different situations, ranging from the revealing of a token that in the basic game only holds potions or the arrival at a specific gameboard location to the performance of a contract card (a commonly available task). Furthermore, at the beginning of the campaign each player starts with a deck of cards which is identic to the standard Clank! starting decks, but during the course of the campaign the composition of the player decks is bound to change due to the development of his franchise. Depending on a player's performance in the current game, the player will be able to record a number of checkmarks on his status record, and here once again the reading of new paragraphs from the Book of Secrets, the paragraph book, may be triggered. Finally, even the knockout of a player may bring up new game situations, introducing competition in form of Dran Enterprises, a rival dungeon exploration business.

New stickers, cards and tokens really spice up every new game of Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated enormously, but it is most important to say at this point: the game will still be a Clank!! Indeed all basic Clank! rules have been incorporated on a 1-to-1 base into the new Legacy-concept, with only a few minor tweaks in order to ensure coherent gameplay in the new game. A great new experience in the amazing world of Clank!.